Harlan Ellison - Spider Kiss

Shelly winced at the thought.

Costanza slapped his hat back onto his balding head and turned to go. At the door he paused, smiled benignly, insipidly, helplessly, and said, “ Ciao !” Then he was gone.

Shelly put Stag to bed and completed inking the itinerary for the start of the road tour the next day. Later, he thought about it, and decided that his first impression was correct. A Pink Squirrel mixed with a Singapore Sling was mondo hideous.

He shuddered, left a note he had written to the Colonel on the desk, turned off the lights, and went home to Carlene.

She thought it was pretty bad, too.

There is a kind of girl who is seen at certain (right) bars, at jazz nightclubs of the Birdland variety, at cabana clubs, who dances the merengue with the proper hip movements, whose person is all one, the same person. A type.

It is difficult to describe this type, this person—so many of this person.

A description needs specifics—and all the specifics of this person are nebulosities. Unless you know what to look for, unless you can sense them (as the poet said: sniffing

strange ), see the aura that surrounds them, you will have no idea of the subjects in question.

The girls are easier to spot than the men. The men generally have casual Peter Gunn haircuts or pomaded pompadoured hair; they usually wear Continental clothes (like the little Italian messenger boys on Madison Avenue) or they wear the one-button rolls. They come in many shapes and shingles, but they aren’t too important here. The girls … the Girl … this girl.

This girl has fine legs that look tight and good in her straight, tight skirt. No matter whether this girl is one hundred percent Italian or two hundred percent Yiddish, her profile is strictly Irish. Clean-cut. Sultry. Desirable. Empty.

Surface-seeing. Easy to covet, these girls, this girl is too easy to covet. This girl’s hair is soft, glowing and probably (today) in an artichoke. She taps her hands when she hears the music. She applauds at the wrong place, before the number is finished, when an unimportant, saying-nothing soloist has pyrotechnicked.

She is the girl the conga player eyes from the bandstand.

She is a hipster.

There is a great deal of difference between a truly “hip” person (that indefinable awareness of what is right, what is current, what is lasting; beyond sophistication, beyond class, it is the essence of being “with it") and a hipster.

A hipster is a pseudo. The good-looking girl from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, who feels stifled (for the wrong reasons) in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and emigrates to Chicago. Look for the girl two months later in the bars on Chicago’s Rush Street. Look for her just off Times Square; on L.A.’s Strip. You know her. The sleek, well-fed, looks-to-be-good-in-the-hay chick who crosses her legs too high. The chick who gets her meals bought, who has to worry about paying only for her extensive clothing needs and the rent.

Often, it’s only the clothes.

This is the girl who thinks Don Ho is a jazz singer, who goes to Birdland to hear Herbie Mann’s Afro-Jazz Sextet because he plays the kind of jazz you might (if you were a hipster) cha-cha to. This is the girl who wears charm bracelets that jingle.

This is the empty woman, without her own standards, with a Hollywood conception of reality, the girl who talks during the sax man’s solo.

See then, a cultural phenomenon. A leech personality, singularly devoid of purpose, of substantiality. The shadow-people.

The hipsters. The people Sheldon Morgenstern knew well.

And the people Stag Preston knew well. The ones who infested his life in the great cities where he worked and preyed. But these were not the ones who came to the Stag Preston concerts. Mashed Potato Falls, Kansas, had its share of girls, to be sure, but they were wide-eyed and their mouths hung open, exposing the wads of chewing gum.

Yet they were broads.

Chicks.

Stuff.

And Stag Preston—who longed for the sleek, well-fed gloss of his New York hipsters—was forced to make do with what was on hand and underfoot.

It had taken Shelly a long time to recognize the hipster for what he or she is. It had taken him too long, perhaps, but when he did, he realized that the greater portion of his life, all the things he had valued as “with it” were only dross. That was when he first began thinking about the way out. When he realized, sensed, tagged, identified the phonies who did not act like the phonies. The hipsters. A set to which he belonged, blood and bones. A set he abruptly knew was not so much his any longer. He was growing away.

From them.

The hipsters.

Stag Preston’s friends. Not his worshippers (as the kids at the concerts were his subjects), but his friends.

They never saw these people at the concerts Stag gave. They never saw them, because they were the ones who only went to the “hip” places, and a rock’n’roll show was certainly (Jeezus, are you kidding ?) not hip. Instead, Shelly and Stag came into contact with the grass-roots, the vacuous adolescents who were too much in love with an image to recognize the stain that by now showed clearly in Stag’s handsome, arrogantly casual demeanor.

The tour ran a month. In Philadelphia at the Stanley Theatre they had a near-riot in which three girls and a scrawny youth of indeterminate sex were trampled. That was the first stop of the twenty-city tour. From Philly (and a side trip to Chester, Pennsylvania, to put in a brief, uneventful appearance at a charity show for a new school bus) they moved on—the entire company of no-some-and-much talent acts—to the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. It was the biggest smash show since Frankie Avalon had broken it up at the Pier the year before. An old woman from Connecticut hit the water. She was rescued. The newspapers picked it up, anyhow: that was how Shelly made his money. Rub-a-dubdub!

Then Boston, Buffalo (Stag enjoyed the zoo and rock garden), Indianapolis, Des Moines and Cleveland. In Cleveland Stag staged a triumphal return engagement at the high school where he had had his first important exposure. They also did three shows at the Palace Theatre.

Then in rapid succession came the Fox in Detroit, the Woods Theatre in Chicago (and appearances on Marty Faye’s tv show, Dan Sorkin’s radio show and a spread with Hefner at the Playboy offices), a barn-like hall in Milwaukee whose overlong title blissfully slipped from Shelly’s memory, K.C., St. Louis, Omaha, Dallas, Houston, Salt Lake City (where Stag threatened to drive a friend’s sports car across the Bonneville Salt Flats at 150 mph and was restrained only by force) and Reno. When they reached Las Vegas, where Stag was initially booked at the Sands (while the rest of the company, on half-salary, lolled, languished and lost their loot at the faro tables), Freeport was waiting.

He took precisely sixty-eight seconds to commend Stag on the wonderful job he had been doing, patted the boy on the shoulder, took the cigarette away from him, and ushered Shelly into the elevator, leaving the star surrounded by his acolytes, four girls from the Sands chorus line and the baggage.

On the way up, Shelly gently extricated Stag’s ex-smoke from the Colonel’s fingers and finished the butt. “What’s happening?” Shelly asked. “How come you’re here?”

The Colonel delivered a withering glance signifying: Don’t you know better than to talk in the elevator in front of an elevator girl who’s probably getting paid to remember what cursed bigmouths like you haven’t sense enough to keep to yourself till you’re safely behind closed doors ?

It was quite the glance, all things considered.